But we must return to the first night. It was the 2nd of February. All the intellect and fashion of the town were present: Burke, Fox, Wyndham, Gibbon, in the front row, and, above all, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who took a particular interest in her performance of the character. He had a seat in the orchestra, where he was privileged to sit on account of his deafness. He had constantly urged her to act Lady Macbeth before, and had designed her dress for the sleep-walking scene. Needless to say that her usual nervousness was magnified tenfold. All had declared her incapable of rendering the grander plays of Shakespeare. She had reached, they maintained, the highest point which she was capable of attaining, and her straining higher was simply presumption. She knew, therefore, that if she had been criticised before, the observations now would be much more severe. The representation of the other parts also did not satisfy her. Smith, popularly known as “Gentleman Smith” because he generally did the light and airy part of lover in comedy parts, was the Macbeth, Brereton the Macduff, and Bensley the Banquo; and the memory of the popularity of Mrs. Pritchard in the part, seemed to stand between her and her audience. She had already begged Dr. Johnson to let her know his opinion of Mrs. Pritchard, whom she had never seen, and she tells us in her _Autograph Recollections_ that he answered:— “‘Madam, she was a vulgar idiot; she used to speak of her “gownd,” and she never read any part in a play in which she acted except her own. She no more thought of the play out of which her part was taken than a shoemaker thinks of the skin out of which the piece of leather of which he is making a pair of shoes is cut.’ Is it possible, thought I, that Mrs. Pritchard, the greatest of all the Lady Macbeths, should never have read the play? and I concluded that the Doctor must have been misinformed; but I was afterwards assured by a gentleman, a friend of Mrs. Pritchard, that he had supped with her one night after she had acted Lady Macbeth, and that she declared she had never perused the whole tragedy. I cannot believe it.” It would seem difficult to such a worker as Mrs. Siddons to conceive the possibility of a woman not mastering the whole play if she had to act the part of Lady Macbeth, but we think Dr. Johnson must have been too severe when he called an actress who for years had held the stage with Garrick “a vulgar idiot.” And there is little doubt that the tradition of her acting in the part of Lady Macbeth still had a firm hold on the memory of the audience. As a proof of this we will here quote an incident that occurred the first night:—